BY
Kelly Robinson
Philip (Phil) Neujahr grew up in California and attended Stanford University for an undergraduate degree in philosophy and Yale University for his master’s and Ph.D. He arrived at Oglethorpe after spotting a job offer on a 3" x 5" index card on a Yale bulletin board. In April 1973 he made his first trip to Atlanta and started teaching soon after. “I felt very lucky. Just having your Ph.D. from Yale was not a guarantee of getting a job as a philosophy professor,” recalls Phil.
THREE DECADES AS OGLETHORPE’S POWER COUPLE PHIL NEUJAHR & VICKY WEISS
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OGLETHORPE UNIVERSITY
In December 1976, Victoria (Vicky) Weiss interviewed with professors Bill Brightman, Linda Taylor and Phil Neujahr in a hotel room in New York City while attending a conference. She was just finishing her Ph.D. in English at Lehigh University, where she also received her master’s degree. Vicky was in the enviable position of having two job offers – Oglethorpe and the University of Hawaii at Honolulu. Although some might have chosen the tropical location of Hawaii, Vicky remembers a graduate professor’s comment that cemented her decision, “What work of real academic rigor has ever come out of Hawaii?” So the young woman from Cleveland, Ohio, who had never been farther south than Washington, D.C., felt fortunate to have a job in the exciting, growing city of Atlanta, and she began teaching at Oglethorpe in the fall of 1977.